Belkin delivered the new modem yesterday, again the Belkin FSD7633 and all seems well. From the first power up all went pretty much fine, no delays or errors, no channel hopping etc..

Lets hope this one lasts this time!

Just had a call from Belkin saying that they are going to ship me a replacement for the router they sent me a week or two back. Now to be completely fair that really is very good, I bought my original modem router back at the end of 2004 and now in 2006 they have replace the dead one free of charge and now they are going to replace that one also. In my book that is pretty good customer service, but it still doesn’t say much for the product. It is normal that you do get the odd lemon of product so will report back on this new one when it arrives.

Lets hope this one is a bit better! :)

I have never really been one for many tweaks with Hi-Fi but sometimes there are the odd things that can make a difference. Power cables are an odd one as sometimes you end up doing more harm to the sound than good, what you think is an improvement is really just different. With this in mind I found an oldish Soniclink S-Gold mains cable that I have laying about for a while and plugged it into one of my active speakers. The result with just one mains cable was apparent, things were clearer on one side. I thought this was pretty interesting so I had a look around for another one of these mains leads but Soniclink were no where to be found.

A few years back Soniclink changed their name to Black Rhodium, so this is where to start, the cables name had also changed their name from the S-Gold to the Supermains 13 I think?. Well I now have another which I got at a very good price, the only problem at the moment is that my left ear is a bit mashed. (Very Mashed!) Anyway I have given it a try and there are some differences and for once unlike audio in general they are not subtle you can clearly hear a difference. But with audio is this a good difference?, well I can’t really say until my ear is better but here is my general observations so far.

The overall balance of the sound is much better everything seems to fit together a bit nicer, the bass is much deeper and more coherent in general, in the lower registers you would think the sound had somehow slowed down but it hasn’t somethings seem faster but the notes are better defined. The mids seem smoother and a tad clearer but at the same time it seems to add a tiny tiny bit of warmth which you could say is the leading edge of a note not having as much attack but still retaining it’s bite. In the top end everything seems to be great, nice detailed. I will report some more on the top end once my ear is sorted out. Overall the sound is pretty good, what hits you is the lack out background noise and general hash seem to be missing which is great!.

Ok after all this is it better? well I will have to tell you when my ear is better as I can’t hear much HF out my left ear so that makes it very hard to say what going on with the imaging and the top end. Will report soon.

At last I am back online!. Last Tuesday my Belkin Modem/Router just died for no reason, at that point thats when I remembered why I had picked Belkin. Belkin stuff comes with a nice Lifetime thingy for replacements, I got straight on to them and sure enough they agreed to replace it for free. So at last back online no more modem at super slow poo speeds and no more 1p/min. The new modem router is the FSD7633 which seems very nice so far, it’s only been a few hours now but all is well again.